Aleksandar Kostadinov

I wanted to embark on a new adventure and continue the exploration of questions that emerged from my previous investigations i.e. bachelor and master’s thesis.

I think that NUS, more than any other local university, reflects the spirit of Singapore, thus representing a balanced mix of healthy ambitiousness, intellectual receptiveness, and exceptional human capital.

There is certainly more freedom to one’s activities but it comes with a price tag which means more responsibility.

In my thesis, I wanted to explore how different certain professions go about designing certain robotic configurations. I noticed that in many cases, the designers start with a big idea that they want to recreate with various tools and mechanisms. Having realized that the majority of those approaches were not able to yield robust results, I decided to take a different path by starting with a very simple idea and slowly working towards a larger configuration. The results of this design approach lead to a much better performance of the final design.

I would definitely have chosen the same supervisor. He is an expert in his domain, which is probably one of the main reasons for the positive results presented in my thesis.

I hope that my research will teach aspiring scholars, who have a background in Industrial Design, to be more aware of how valuable their skills are outside of their profession, especially in academic research for the 21st century.

I am currently working as a research fellow at the Evolution Innovation Lab (Department of Biomedical Engineering, NUS) where I investigate and develop solutions for urban agriculture. Our project is concerned with automation i.e. robotics for vertical farming, which will support Singapore in its aims to increase local food production.